More '˜star experiences' to follow Robert De Niro

Former Halifax Town footballer Stephen Oleksewycz runs An Experience With, based at Dean Clough.

He arranged for actor De Niro to have dinner at the Ricci’s restaurant in Halifax town centre before the actor took part in two sell-out events organised by Stephen in Leeds and Birmingham at the end of last month that had a combined audience of 2,500 people.

Now Stephen says he has plenty more big events in the pipeline.

He said: “I can’t disclose who we have coming up but it’s big.

“We’ve already had Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Pacino, but we’ve got three or four A-listers lined-up.

“The Robert De Niro events were absolutely amazing, we couldn’t have asked for them to go any better.

“I was in Barcelona at the Arnold Classic event at the time, and when I got the email through I nearly chocked on my food.

“It had been touch and go whether it would happen, and we only had eight weeks’ notice to arrange everything.

“He’d never done anything like it before, it was a world exclusive, but he was filming in London so he had a window of time.

“It was a lot of hard work, a lot of marketing.”

Stephen says his company is going from strength-to-strength.

He added: “I would liken it to a snowball rolling down a mountain.

“It’s taken 12 years to get to the top of that mountain, but it’s endless where we can take it.

“We’ve got five-star reviews which helps massively, and nearly 40,000 likes on Facebook.

“We’ve got celebrities queuing up for us.

“It’s a very niche market and there’s no-one else in the world doing what we do.

“We want to pull off another four high-class events.

“We’ve got the Arnold Classic in 2020, which is huge.

“There may be a behind-the-scenes TV programme in the pipeline too.”